


before the taking of a toast and tea

by kyrilu



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Ambiguous Relationships, Backstory, Canonical Character Death, F/F, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-30
Updated: 2012-11-30
Packaged: 2017-11-19 21:19:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/577773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyrilu/pseuds/kyrilu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or, the fic where M takes in and trains an orphaned Eve.</p>
            </blockquote>





	before the taking of a toast and tea

**Author's Note:**

> The Eve and M relationship is possibly the most ambiguously written thing I have ever written. So: you can see it as romantic, or platonic, or whatever you like. Yes, I realize that I messed up on ages -- I wrote Eve quite young during the events of Skyfall, like around Q’s age, but meh, too lazy to pick at this any more, and what is with me and this fandom and ships crossing all traditionally acknowledged age lines.
> 
> ...I really should have made this darker and pushed for something more Bond/Eve/M-ish, which is really what this is, under the surface.

**i.**

 

When Eve’s father is killed in action, M takes his daughter to the MI6 shooting range and shows her how to use a gun.

Eve is seventeen, and this is the first time M speaks orders into her ear.

Her name isn’t _Eve_ back then; it’s something else. Instead M calls her by her father’s codename, like she’s one of her agents, and that’s who and what she learns to become.

Later, M takes her home and shows her how to make her tea the way she likes it -- two sugars, stirred carefully in -- and Eve angles the kettle and sugar cube bowl into her arms on the way to the parlour, teaspoon gripped between her teeth.

 

**ii.**

 

She goes out into fieldwork because she remembers the way her father’s holster pressed against her hip when he came home and hugged her.

Sometimes he smelt like gunpowder and sweat and a thousand other terrible things, but Eve had let herself be swept up into his arms because he’s her father -- he’s all she got. He’d given her postcards of all the places he had been -- Madrid, Budapest, New York, Hong Kong.

Eve still has them, but she keeps them in a box underneath her bed. They have tape on the back of them, because she used to hang them up on the fridge with magnets shaped like seashells. (She lost a lot of things from that old flat, including those magnets -- most of the stuff had been cleaned away, sold away, destroyed by MI6, but M had come back from work one day with the postcards in that box.)

When she’s old enough she leaves for her own missions around the globe. She sees the world for the first time, and she maps strategies and plans in her head, enjoying the neat way they fall together.

There’s the plan and there’s the execution, a far away shot from bird’s eye view, sniper’s rifle tucked underneath her arm.

Then there’s the words, the smooth charm and grace directed toward the target. That part is decent -- she’d rather be at a distance, honestly, with her plans and rifle and sharp eyes.

When she comes home, she reads Tennyson aloud to M, who pretends to scoff at the tumult of poetic prose, but smiles anyway at her favourite lines.

M has a picture of her late husband (the former owner of the Tennyson books, of course) on the mantelpiece, but Eve finds out later that he was kept in the dark about M’s job -- protocols, protocols -- and she’s viciously glad that M has her now.

 

**iii.**

 

M picks out the name _Eve_ without a hint of irony.

It makes the newly-christened Eve roll her eyes and kiss M’s forehead with a hint of exasperation, but she secretly appreciates the biblical edge of it.

She keeps _Moneypenny_ , of course, but that goes without saying.

 

**iv.**

 

Eve shuffles with mission files and reports, the papers spread out all over her bedroom desk.

She loathes her current supervisor -- not M, not yet -- so she figures out how to do her missions her own way, and it works for her.

One night she sleeps with her head on the desk, and she remembers that when she was seventeen (a young girl who never actually cried for her father; who shuffles through sticky postcards and polishes guns in her spare time), M took her out to the sea.

They had stood on the pier, watching the waves.

M gives her twenty pence for a coin-operated binocular and Eve dispenses it and counts the birds.

She prefers sniper scopes the next year (which don’t shutter off after a few minutes of viewing), but M still takes her there on holiday.

 

**v.**

 

So she meets James Bond and he’s a charming bastard when it comes down to anything.

He knows that M takes her tea with two sugars and he realises that she’s begrudgingly fond of him. Eve knows that M keeps spare dog paperweights at home, just in case the current one breaks. Just for him.

Later, she stretches over him, drags a razor down his cheek.

So this is the sort of person that M loves, yeah?

 

**vi.**

 

She doesn’t think her eyes could ever be that cold, though.

 

**vii.**

 

“Take the shot,” M says, terse, into her earpiece, and she does, and Bond falls into the water -- down down down.

Eve thinks: _you bloody idiot_ , and waits for him to come back and stop making M worry.

She sticks by M’s side and wonders what’s going to happen _next_ \--

 

**viii.**

 

When M dies, an old corpse with her eyes closed for her, Eve keeps vigil, and for Silva, too because she understands what it’s like to to commit and to trust, and in another life, Bond and Silva would be double-o partners under M and Moneypenny’s orders and banter and sharp eyes, and there’d always be tea, and Tennyson, and guns, and missions.

 

**ix.**

 

M leaves her everything except an ugly bull dog with a Union Jack on its back.

“M has a box of those in her basement,” she tells Bond, and she takes him home, and they make tea the way M used to like it.

 

**x.**

 

Sometimes she goes out into the shooting range and leaves bullet holes that spell out M’s name.

(M says once: “I’m too old for this rubbish,” after Bond’s done something particularly stupid. Eve places her hands over M’s, holding the crinkled ink-stained fingers on her own, and that’s more than enough words for the both of them.)

 

**xi.**

 

M is for Moneypenny.

When the time is right, Eve takes a china dog from Bond and sits it on her desk. Next to it is a postcard of that distant old pier, and when she turns it over, it’s blank.

She puts the tip of a pen to the paper, and starts there.

**Author's Note:**

> I swear I will go back to my Bond/M/Silva fic, but I there's just some ideas that I need to get out of my system before I go mad. xD
> 
> (Like: Bond/Eve/Q! I need a banter-y, fun OT3 in this fandom, okay.)


End file.
